Sunday, April 24, 2011

Can political correctness get you killed? It may or it may not by itself, but judging from airport security that I recently encountered courtesy of the TSA, that government entity is not doing a whole lot to prevent an incident from occurring.

The question has long been asked as to whether racial profiling is a good methodology for targeting those believed to have an agenda of death and destruction against the United States and other western countries?

Examining the many of the acts of terrorism carried out in the United States and abroad, racial profiling, if allowed, would tend to target men of Middle Eastern appearance. Additionally it would focus on those with passports from specific Middle Eastern countries.

Unfortunately for national and travel security, profiling of this nature is neither condoned or allowed leading to gaping holes in passenger safety. In fact, judging by a recent international flight I was on, security personnel will tend to go to the other extreme of specifically not scrutinizing Middle Eastern men or women at all.

Kennedy Airport: Security through omission rather than through commission!

With a security line stretching a long way and moving very slowly, I was curious to see the thoroughness of the inspections causing the delays. Was it intense and probing as one would hope with a special eye focused on those fitting a certain description? Or, as suspected, was it cursory at best with the lines slowed by the fact that for hundreds of travelers only two security lines were open?

The cursory level of security I actually encountered did not come as any great surprise, but what I watched at the end of the line did. It was in many ways startling and a perfect example of why security is really nothing more than a charade of form over substance. Something put in place to make the general public feel that things are under control when in reality they are not.

Two Muslim women who were wearing traditional clothing that included covered faces with only their eyes revealed, made their way to the TSA agent checking identification. The agent looked at the pictures and then at the women, and then waved them through. Waved through although any actual identification was virtually impossible. Continuing to watch, they did not get any closer scrutiny as they passed through the detectors where passengers will often be pulled over for enhanced checking.

Why? I can’t answer that except to think that had security applied closer scrutiny to the women there was the potential to have them or others claim profiling and/or Islamophobia.

Therefore, an error made by omission was determined to be more tenable than an act of commission by the powers that be.

For everyone except the flying public that is!

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